Apple has announced the iPhone X, but can buying one fill the yawning void in your soul?

I'm a City A.M. writer covering gadgets, games, film, food and art reviews. You know, all the fun stuff. Drop me an email at steve.hogarty@cityam.com

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Will the latest iPhone, in some small way, ease our collective sense of all-consuming dread?

Steve Hogarty

News from the ever-widening void that encroaches upon our exhausted souls: there’s a brand new mobile telephone coming out, it costs more than one thousand actual pounds and it will very briefly gratify the insatiable chasm that haunts our insides.

It’s called the iPhone X (and pronounced the iPhone 10) and it was announced on Tuesday evening by alternate-timeline Paul O’Grady and Apple CEO Tim Cook, from his brand new $5 billion citadel in Cupertino. The donut-shaped Apple campus resembles an interdimensional portal, laid flat on the grass so that one way points towards the depths of hell and the other is aimed towards unreachable galaxies, as though Apple might to one day try to teleport Satan into a distant nebula.

Here’s everything you need to know about the new phone, which is rumoured to temporarily address that existential unease you feel each morning in the hazy moments between sleep and wakefulness.

You unlock it with your face
The distinctive notch on the front of the iPhone X represents a glut of intelligent sensors that blast an invisible array of 30,000 infrared dots at your stunned jowls in order to identify that you are who you claim to be. Once the phone detects that you have the correct face, the phone unlocks and you are granted full access to all of your precious things, all without having to press your filthy thumb against the pristine glass.

This is similar to how the Samsung Galaxy S8 unlocks by scanning your eyes, though that method could be duped by placing a pair of contact lenses on a printout of the person’s face (this isn’t a joke). Apple says that its FaceID can’t be fooled by a photograph, but the jury is out on whether it could be tricked by a pair of googly eyes pressed into a ham.

It costs as much as the moon
The more capacious of the two models of iPhone X costs £1,159 (the 64GB model is £999, but if you’re about to drop a couple of month’s rent on a new phone, you’re probably not about to lose sleep over that last £160). Apple famously dislikes doing maths, and simply swapped the dollar sign for a pound sign when converting between the two currencies, which means the phone is £282 more expensive in the UK than in the US. That’s about enough to pay for a return flight to America.

It charges wirelessly
A sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic, wireless charging allows you to place your phone on a special pad that transmits helpful electrons directly into the battery, without the need for cables.

There’s no home button
Because the entire front of the phone is one huge, beautiful screen, there’s no longer room for the long-running Home button, arguably the most famous button in the world after Jenson, Benjamin and Moon. Instead you access things using gestures, such as swiping up to return to the home screen, and swiping from a corner to access the Control Centre.